Letting terror win

There is nothing a government in a remotely free country can do to stop a suicide bomber in a crowded space. As a weapon, he has the precision of a drone missile. The only preventive task open to the police and security service is to penetrate and destroy a terrorist cell in advance. This means assiduous intelligence. It has clearly held the key to disarming some 50 ‘terror plots’ known to the police over the past decade.

Every lesson in counter-terrorism warns against overreaction. But David Cameron seems oblivious to this truth. He appears to have no faith in the police to protect British citizens from terrorism. His reaction to the recent bombings in Brussels was to dive into his Cobra ‘bunker’ and emerge declaring that London was ‘under real threat… from appalling terrorists’. An attack on London, he said, was now ‘highly likely’. He has duly put 10,000 troops on standby. The SAS are ready with Osprey V-22 helicopters to race to an incident. London will have another 1,000 armed police and £143 million more for counter-terrorism. This is to be supported by the most draconian internet surveillance in the free world. For good measure, Donald Trump offered a descant, claiming that ‘Belgium and France are literally disintegrating’. He let Britain off for once.

I wonder what terrorist commanders back in Iraq made of this. Did they quake in their boots and cry woe? Or did they, as I suspect, gather round their television sets and cheer? They must have echoed Lenin in calling Cameron their useful idiot.

After an act of terror is committed, the murderer is usually dead. But this is merely the start of his programme. His purpose requires that the horror of his deed be magnified a thousand times to engineer his political goal. Bruce Hoffman, in his classic Inside Terrorism, stresses the role of ‘psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target’.